No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

spared him news of the publication of Liane de Pougy’s raunchy roman à clef, Idylle Saphique. In Paris it was common knowledge that the Flossie Temple Bradford of this romance, who fervently kissed the ankles and thighs of its narrator, was Natalie Barney, the wild girl from Cincinnati, the ash-blonde heiress, who most mornings could be seen galloping bareback in the Bois de Boulogne.

Albert Barney’s intervention was not successful. Confined to bed, he was too ill to surveil his daughter or his wife. Natalie persuaded Renée Vivien to come and stay. To Eva Palmer, who was in Bar Harbor on holiday with her sister May, Natalie sent a copy of Sonnets de Femmes with a note comparing Eva’s heart to the last days of autumn.

Eva, provoked to learn that Natalie and Renée were lovers, and by a dedication that she saw as a denial of her own vitality and youthfulness, invited them to join her at Duck Brook, ‘you know the one I mean where the boys sometimes swim’. They read Swinburne and with a Kodak Brownie box camera took photographs of each other posing naked.

In August, to raise money for the new Bar Harbor hospital, Natalie’s mother staged an all-women theatre piece, scripted by Natalie and her sister, Laura. There were four ‘charming tableaux’: Renée played a spoof Alice in Wonderland, May Palmer was Helen of Troy, Laura was Cleopatra, and Eva, with props of Doric columns and a harp, wearing Grecian robes, strap sandals and with a wreath in her red hair, was Bar Harbor’s Sappho.

Albert Barney stayed in bed.

Eva, Renée, Olive, Oscar, Bosie

Natalie, Eva and Renée moved back to Paris together. For them all, Oscar Wilde was a revered figure from the recent past, a genius and champion of same-sex relationship and free expression, martyred by society. Sylvia Beach hung framed photographs of him on the wall in Shakespeare and Company. Natalie had met him when she was six in the Long Beach Hotel, New York. Boys had pelted her with preserved cherries, which stuck in her hair, and she had run across the hotel lobby crying. Oscar Wilde picked her up and calmed her with his story of The Happy Prince who was in love with a little swallow. Natalie wrote to Wilde when he was in Reading Gaol, saying she wanted to comfort him against his persecutors, as he had comforted her.

Wilde, after persecution and humiliation, died in poverty in a Paris pension, the Hôtel d’Alsace, in November 1900. His lover, Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, then turned against him, his own past, and any public support for homosexuality. Bosie determined to present himself as a heterosexual married man. He looked for a wife among Natalie’s circle – for a wealthy lesbian willing to share her inherited money with his title.

Olive Custance, born in England in 1874, had affairs with both Natalie and Renée Vivien. Her grandfather was the High Sheriff of Norfolk, her father was a Colonel, home was Weston Hall, a sixteenth-century estate in twenty acres of land, and as the elder of two daughters she stood to inherit. Her first volume of poems, Opals, was published in 1897. She prefaced the initial poem, ‘Love’s Firstfruits’, with a quote from Sappho.

‘Opals’, she wrote, ‘are the stones of love and sorrow and they have suggested many of my songs to me.’

Natalie wrote an admiring letter. Olive told the publisher, John Lane of Bodley Head:

I had an adorable letter this morning from a beautiful American girl the author of a new volume of poems which she sent me… She had read Opals and fallen in love with my soul!

Natalie met her. She was taken with Olive’s brilliant eyes, her breathless voice, as well as her soul. ‘Come my poet my priestess’, she wrote to her,

Come it is Tuesday night! Come to me and we will be quiet. I only know that I so love your lips that I will do whatever they tell me.

Olive, for her part, wrote to Bosie praising his sonnets. They exchanged letters, then arranged to meet at London’s South Kensington Museum.4 Bosie was thirty. He said he fell in love at first sight but ‘did not think he had the slightest chance of marrying her’. ‘You are a darling baby’, he wrote to her,

and you are exactly like a boy and you know perfectly well that I love you better than anyone else, boy or girl… You have everything. I used to wish you were a boy, now I am glad you are not.

Separated from him on holiday in France in 1901, Olive wrote,

Oh how I miss you… your sweet golden head, your small red mouth always it seems a little shy of my kisses, and above all your great blue eyes… the most beautiful eyes a boy ever had.

Natalie, she told him,

is rather fascinating and clever but her life is ugly… and I cannot forgive that. She says she loves me, but some who have loved her tell me she does not know what love means… and from what I know of her I can well believe it… but because I am indifferent to her she has a passion for me that is almost beautiful at times. I have prayed all my life that I might meet a man I could love with all my soul.

not all roses

Renée, a part of the amorous circle, wrote to Olive in October 1901:

Sweetest, how maddeningly exquisite it was to hold your fresh frail body in my arms – to clasp you and kiss you in a bewilderment of delight… I wrote to Bosie that you were like a wild rose, all faint perfumes and delicacy of colour, fresh and frail. I love you, who are the one entirely beautiful, entirely joy-giving thing in my life. You have brought me nothing but roses… the roses of Sappho.

Olive, who wanted a husband, got engaged to George Montagu, MP for South Huntingdon, a friend of Bosie’s from their time at Winchester College and, like him,